Covid, Care, and Community

Beginning in March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic plunged educational structures into disarray, with seemingly immutable policies and procedures shifting overnight in response to urgent public health concerns. As instructors scrambled to find ways to teach students remotely with no time to prepare, concerns about technology and pedagogy opened into necessary and often painful conversations about underlying inequities in the structures of higher education that have long persisted. These rapid changes have prompted crucial conversations not only about how graduate education is structured but also about its value and purpose at a moment of significant upheaval. Matters of equity are tantamount to these discussions, as the scholarly community collectively grapples with questions of what we do, how, why, and for whom.

As the pandemic unfolded, the realities of higher education’s inequities were made painfully apparent. Students who relied on computer labs were suddenly left without safe, quiet, internet-equipped spaces to work. Many juggling work and caregiving responsibilities alongside their studies confronted impossible schedules and economic hardship. Thousands of faculty and staff in precarious positions were let go, often with no medical insurance to protect them amid a public health crisis. And because of underlying structural inequalities, these faculty, staff, and students were more likely to hail from minoritized and marginalized communities.1 In this chapter, I examine some of the fundamental inequalities of higher education and ask what it might look like to imagine otherwise.

Balancing the equation of graduate education reform requires attention to a critical variable that is often overlooked: care. In our current political and social moment, spaces of care and support are more important than ever, particularly for students whose backgrounds are typically marginalized in the academy. Regardless of a student’s field or methodology, no matter how traditional or innovative a program’s curriculum, the matter of how students experience and demonstrate care is a crucial element in their eventual success (where success is defined by reaching their own goals). Care work tends to be feminized in academia as it is in many other domains; as such, it is often undervalued despite its importance. Knowing how to tap into some of the academy’s more typical structures of care—those found in mentoring, advising, and developing a peer network—may not be equally available to all students. Because a certain amount of educational and cultural knowledge is required to navigate the spaces of the academy, these areas of support can become part of the hidden curriculum, leaving first-generation students and students of color less likely to ask for the support they need for fear of seeming like they do not belong.

Like many U.S. institutions, from healthcare to policing, higher education is structured in a way that upholds a status quo. This is not necessarily a bad thing; institutions are often intentionally conservative, which provides stability and longevity. However, it does become a problem when that status quo is grounded in inequality, which I argue is the case for higher education. Although the idea of the “life of the mind” might seem to be beyond the effects of systematic injustice, in reality, higher education’s prestige economy perpetuates a structure of patriarchal white supremacy and a myth of meritocracy. This structure leads to continued marginalization along axes of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and more. This is especially apparent in labor structures: for example, underpaid adjuncts are far more likely to be women from minoritized communities, but tenured professors are more likely to be white men, even at an institution as diverse as the City University of New York (CUNY), the large public university system where I worked from 2014 until 2021.

Even for those in secure positions, the nature of scholarly work has shifted unequally, particularly with regard to gender, due not only to well-documented gender bias but also to the uneven distribution of care work.2 In colleges and universities, this work takes the shape of mentoring, guiding, supporting, and sustaining so that others may continue to advance toward their goals. Given the trauma of the pandemic, many people in the higher education community have experienced profound distress. Faculty and staff members found themselves undertaking a significant increase in care and support work to try and support vulnerable students and colleagues, all while navigating their own highly stressful pandemic realities. We know from countless sources, from anecdotes to peer-reviewed research, that women, and especially women of color, tend to perform more of the work of care and support than cis men in educational contexts.3 In this way, it is similar to other kinds of care work in that it is reproductive, easing the friction of others’ progress and accomplishments while often going unnoticed and unrewarded.

This increase in academic care work adds to imbalances in the home that have also been exacerbated during the challenges of navigating work and home life during the Covid-19 pandemic. And yet, this imbalance often goes unperceived by those who benefit from it. One recent study showed that among heterosexual couples with small children, men tended to think they were doing most of the childcare and housework, and yet in reality, most of that work continued to be performed by women.4 The result has been a striking imbalance in research productivity, the usual mode of measuring academic success and progress. Although scholarly journal submissions from men increased during the period of isolation, submissions from women—and especially women with caregiving responsibilities—plummeted.5

I felt this imbalance in my own life, where especially in the early days of stay-at-home orders I took on the majority of caring for my two young children while working full-time as an administrator at The Graduate Center, CUNY.6 I directed a group of about ten people that included graduate students, a postdoctoral fellow, and staff members. My leadership was predicated on care, and I worked hard to try and ensure that our team felt supported to the degree possible while so much was in upheaval. It was a lot. In fact, all this contributed to the difficult decision to leave my position in September 2021, despite how much I care about CUNY as an institution. In this, I was like countless others who have significantly changed their relationship to work during the Covid-19 pandemic.

And yet, even to be able to make such a decision was a tremendous privilege. My spouse and I have financial security. We live in a quiet, comfortable apartment with access to outdoor space. We can both work from home and have a choice in whether and when to take exposure risks. Our family has plenty to eat. As a white woman, it is highly unlikely that I will ever be harmed by the police, especially in my own home. Much of this nation’s social, economic, and educational infrastructure was designed to protect and benefit people like me.

Many of my team members could not have said the same. As graduate students, even graduate students in a strongly unionized institution, they were in precarious financial and labor situations. Many were students of color and international students for whom the disparities of education, health, and policing are painfully clear in their daily lived realities. And in the midst of this trauma—one that follows generations of racism and inequity, brought into especially sharp relief in recent years—they are also the ones supporting their own students.

Graduate students have so little support and yet for those who are teaching, as most CUNY Graduate Center students are, they are also the first and most direct point of contact for countless undergraduate students whose lives may be even more severely upended. CUNY serves five hundred thousand students from across the five boroughs of New York City, and a significant majority of them navigate the city from a marginalized position related to their racial or ethnic background, immigration status, and socioeconomic status. The college setting sometimes provides a sense of belonging, sometimes alienation. Most of them are taking courses from graduate students and adjunct faculty who lack a living wage, job security, or office space. Yet I see these graduate students and adjuncts putting themselves out there day after day, caring deeply not only for their students’ learning but also their students’ well-being. They love what they do and feel a strong sense of commitment. As I argued in Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, however, conflating love with labor is risky because it makes it easy to minimize the value of the work and to neglect material needs. The ways in which adjuncts and graduate students show care to their students is work, and it is hugely important work. But because care work tends to be feminized and undercompensated, and because cities and states have been reducing their investment in higher education for decades, these brilliant and caring educators are at a breaking point.

Working in an underfunded public university system made it clearer than ever that public reinvestment in higher education is absolutely foundational to any kind of meaningful reform. It may be impossible to extricate educational systems from the structural inequalities they uphold, but I strongly believe that we can create and protect spaces that offer freedom and hope if there is sufficient support. CUNY faculty and staff must frequently conjure something from nothing, buying their own supplies and working in buildings with inadequate infrastructure. Yet it is not that the state has insufficient money to support education but rather that other initiatives are given higher priority. Education has long been a place where budget cuts happen first when city and state budgets are tight, something with which CUNY is intimately familiar. For example, in summer 2020, after the first brutal Covid-19 wave in New York City when many students sought affordable options for online learning, CUNY’s enrollment increased by 17 percent. Yet CUNY was subjected to massive system-wide budget cuts, which resulted in significant course reductions and the layoffs of nearly three thousand adjunct faculty.7 The program I codirected had its operating budget cut by 80 percent; other programs were hit even harder. It almost goes without saying that students from marginalized racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds were hurt most significantly by these cuts, given that many were already in precarious positions not only with respect to their education but also with respect to their health, safety, and financial well-being.

All of our social systems—including education, health, and policing—are connected. Rather than creating a robust safety net, though, the deeply rooted inequity in each of these structures compound with one another. The result is an exponentially greater risk for people whose identities are marginalized in one or more ways. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately struck the Black and Latinx communities because of a lack of access to quality health care, a predominance of low-wage work that cannot be performed remotely, resulting either in joblessness or exposure, and high-risk comorbidities resulting from generations of social and health disparities.8 In addition to these health and economic impacts, the ongoing trauma of racialized violence at the hands of the state continues unabated.9 As protests in support of Black Lives Matter underscored, there is a glaring discrepancy between the willingness of city and state leaders to continually increase funding to police departments as a proportion of public spending, but other public services—including health care, social services, transportation, and education—sustain budget cuts year after year.10 Shifting funds from punitive measures like policing and incarceration would immediately open significant opportunities to better support individuals and communities.

Education is supposed to be a “way out” of poverty, a ticket to greater opportunities; CUNY has indeed been shown to propel many students into more financially stable lives than their parents had, with many of the CUNY colleges near the top of lists of institutions providing social mobility.11 But when education continues to perpetuate the same violence, and the same inequity, as every other social system, is it worth it? My work focuses on transforming graduate education, with a particular focus on equity, sustainability, and even joy. But it is impossible to skip equity in trying to reach the other goals. Sustainability and joy can only emerge when programs reckon with the racism and inequity that are woven into the fabric of their competitive, hierarchical structures. The possibility of joy in graduate education, for me, is pressed tightly against my anger at a system that does so much harm to so many brilliant, caring students and educators.

A significant portion of my work as an administrator was likely invisible to anyone except my team. Some of this work would likely have been categorized as service in a faculty position—mentorship, advising, and guiding the graduate students and postdocs on our team, for instance. Given the intensity of graduate school, this involves a great deal of care work, helping each member of our team to manage their competing obligations and reach their goals. For many students on our team, these elements of support and the resulting joy of the community were a welcome counterbalance to the toll of graduate school, which too often causes students to experience significant emotional, psychological, and physical challenges that have nothing to do with their studies. Our team worked hard; our weekly meetings included a sometimes daunting agenda of upcoming events and responsibilities. Yet the meetings became a source of sustenance for the staff members and graduate students who made up the core program team during an especially challenging year. This was not alchemy. The program I codirected emphasized elements that could be applied to any graduate education context, whether in a department, a workplace, or an extracurricular group. These translatable elements include trust, material support, and a shared mission.

A major challenge in creating holistic and sustaining programs is that higher education operates on an economy of prestige. In this economy, the so-called life of the mind takes center stage, leaving little room for attention to physical and emotional well-being. A different orientation—one that prioritizes people over prestige—is essential to creating supportive and sustainable structures. However, programs in interstitial spaces often have greater flexibility than those with longstanding institutional mandates. The bigger challenge, then, is how to build lasting change by incorporating similar methods into academic departments, where students and faculty put down intellectual and professional roots. Although elements of our work at the Futures Initiative could absolutely be used in academic and extracurricular or cocurricular programs, other elements may simply not be possible in a core academic department. Academic departments tend to be competitive spaces with finite resources that are unevenly distributed. This is fundamentally different from a space like the Futures Initiative. Despite the program’s location within the competitive space of a research institution, within the program, the values shift. In a program like the Futures Initiative, there is no weeding out or formal evaluation, as such programs are not gatekeepers to students’ degrees or careers. Students are not vying for resources or faculty time, nor are they jockeying for position. Perhaps the inherently competitive and evaluative nature of academic programs means that work like this can only exist in interstitial spaces.

That said, with the pandemic’s effects still fresh in mind, we have a unique opportunity to try. As institutions nationwide rapidly shifted to emergency online instruction in spring 2020, it became clear that sweeping change was possible in institutions that often seem resistant to reform. These changes were undertaken in a crisis and were far from perfect, yet they suggested the possibility that deep reform might be possible. The question that remains is how might we (scholars, administrators, and graduate students) take action to redesign graduate education in favor of more holistic and sustaining systems. Opportunities like those afforded by the Futures Initiative are rare in academe, but they do not have to be. The collaborative nature of the program has proven to be intellectually generative and has sparked new scholarly insights. Graduate fellows in the program often reported that they were waiting for this kind of opportunity; they found that it brought their work to life in a new way. This suggests there is an alternative to the more dominant, prestige-oriented model of graduate education. I look to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s exhortation in Generous Thinking to replace the default scholarly position of competition with one of generosity. I also look to bell hooks’s earlier assertion in Teaching Community, “Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness” (xiv). Hope and joy are not a way of sugarcoating reality; on the contrary, hope is at its most powerful when the circumstances seem bleak. I think of Toni Cade Bambara’s reflection on what she perceived as her responsibility: “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.”12 To extend Bambara’s framework for arts and culture, I would argue that the beauty, joy, and hope of education are predicated on the possibility of change. To go a step further, perhaps graduate education can be a source of joy if it is also a lever of social justice. Enabling doctoral students to pursue deep and rigorous education that also furthers goals they have within their multiple communities may help to reduce feelings of alienation and isolation that often accompany doctoral work and to spark a sense of meaning and contribution that brings the research to life.

As these examples suggest, generosity, abundance, hope, and joy can form a foundation on which our educational principles are grounded. Feminist scholarship by Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color offers especially rich perspectives on the praxis of hope and joy, even (and especially) in difficult times. Scholarly work is all about creating new knowledge, new ways of being, and new possibilities. Such goals could create a mindset of curiosity and abundance, but higher education has come to be dominated by a sense of scarcity and competition. Yet a sense of scarcity is necessary for the university’s value when that value is predicated on prestige. Shifting from a prestige-oriented system to one that is fundamentally rooted in abundance and generosity would require a massive change not only in values but also in the structures that have been developed on the basis of those values.13

I think the first step may be to simply stop for a moment. There is power in collective action, in a protest, in a strike, and in the act of saying, “No more.” Before we can build new systems and structures and incentives and task forces, I think we need to pause and say no. No, some of this work does not matter, and we can let it drop. No, we will not continue to exploit adjunct labor. No, we will not ask the impossible of our underfunded institutions, constantly pressured to do more with less. For me, there is hope in this refusal because it says that a different way is possible.